Overview

A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

More About
This Book

Overview

A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .” With these famous words, Charles Dickens plunges the reader into one of history’s most explosive eras—the French Revolution. From the storming of the Bastille to the relentless drop of the guillotine, Dickens vividly captures the terror and upheaval of that tumultuous period. At the center is the novel’s hero, Sydney Carton, a lazy, alcoholic attorney who, inspired by a woman, makes the supreme sacrifice on the bloodstained streets of Paris.

One of Dickens’s most exciting novels, A Tale of Two Cities is a stirring classic of love, revenge, and resurrection.

Gillen D’Arcy Wood received his Ph.D in English from Columbia University in 2000 and is currently an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760–1860.

More by this Author

Gillen D’Arcy Wood received his Ph.D in English from Columbia University in 2000 and is currently an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760–1860.

Biography

Born on February 7, 1812, Charles Dickens was the second of eight children in a family burdened with financial troubles. Despite difficult early years, he became the most successful British writer of the Victorian age.

In 1824, young Charles was withdrawn from school and forced to work at a boot-blacking factory when his improvident father, accompanied by his mother and siblings, was sentenced to three months in a debtor's prison. Once they were released, Charles attended a private school for three years. The young man then became a solicitor's clerk, mastered shorthand, and before long was employed as a Parliamentary reporter. When he was in his early twenties, Dickens began to publish stories and sketches of London life in a variety of periodicals.

It was the publication of Pickwick Papers (1836-1837) that catapulted the twenty-five-year-old author to national renown. Dickens wrote with unequaled speed and often worked on several novels at a time, publishing them first in monthly installments and then as books. His early novels Oliver Twist (1837-1838), Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1841), and A Christmas Carol (1843) solidified his enormous, ongoing popularity. As Dickens matured, his social criticism became increasingly biting, his humor dark, and his view of poverty darker still. David Copperfield (1849-1850), Bleak House (1852-1853), Hard Times (1854), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1860-1861), and Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865) are the great works of his masterful and prolific period.

In 1858 Dickens's twenty-three-year marriage to Catherine Hogarth dissolved when he fell in love with Ellen Ternan, a young actress. The last years of his life were filled with intense activity: writing, managing amateur theatricals, and undertaking several reading tours that reinforced the public's favorable view of his work but took an enormous toll on his health. Working feverishly to the last, Dickens collapsed and died on June 8, 1870, leaving The Mystery of Edwin Drood uncompleted.

Author biography from the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of David Copperfield.

Read an Excerpt

From Gillen D'Arcy Wood's Introduction to A Tale of Two Cities

When Dickens expressed to A. H. Layard his fear of revolution in Britain in 1855, he only echoed many dozens of commentators over the preceding six decades, who wondered why mob violence could not simply cross the English Channel and turn the streets of London into a bloodbath of class retribution. The textbook historian's answer points to the bloodless coup of 1688, the so-called Glorious Revolution, which saw the tyrant James II forced into exile, and William and Mary inaugurate a form of managerial rule in Britain, a constitutional, "mixed" monarchy where many absolute powers of the Crown were ceded to Parliament. With the consolidation of that legislative body, however unrepresentative, Britain's nobility insured itself against the apocalyptic disaster that was to befall their French counterparts. The divergent tale of the two cities thus begins in 1688.

But as a novelist, Dickens, who loved Paris and traveled there often, offers more intuitive, closely observed reasons for the untranslatable quality of that city's Revolution. In an 1856 article for his weekly magazine, Household Words, he calls Paris "the Moon," and describes a culture of spectacle implicitly alien to his London readers. On the grand Parisian boulevards, Dickens watches the upper classes put on "a mighty show." Later, he takes coffee and a cigar at one of Paris's ubiquitous cafés, and participates in a kind of collective voyeurism unfamiliar to the English capital:

The place from which the shop front has been taken makes a gay proscenium; as I sit and smoke, the street becomes a stage, with an endless procession of lively actors crossing and re-crossing. Women with children, carts and coaches, men on horseback, soldiers, water-carriers with their pails, family groups, more soldiers, lounging exquisites, more family groups (coming past, flushed, a little late for the play). . . . We are all amused, sitting seeing the traffic in the street, and the traffic in the street is in its turn amused by seeing us ("Railway Dreaming," pp. 373-374). Paris is a society of spectacle, a glamorous outdoor "stage" where citizens are both actors and audience. Later in the article, however, Dickens describes a more sinister aspect of this culture of display when he is jostled by the crowds at the Paris morgue, whose "bodies lie on inclined planes within a great glass window, as though Holbein should represent Death, in his grim Dance, keeping a shop, and displaying his goods like a Regent Street or boulevard linen-draper" (p. 375). Dickens is unnerved here, as he was at Horsemonger Lane, by a society that places no restraints on visibility, even to preserve the solemnity of the dead.

It is a short step in Dickens's imagination from the peep-show atmosphere of the Paris morgue in 1856 to the ritual slaughter in the Place de la Révolution during Robespierre's "Reign of Terror" of 1793-1794. A Tale of Two Cities shows the dark side of urban theatricality, that a public appetite for glamorous "show" can rapidly degenerate into an insatiable hunger for "scenes of horror and demoralization." The essentially theatrical quality of Parisian social life produces a theatrical Revolution. At the revolutionary "trials" at the Hall of Examination, Madame Defarge, we are told, "clapped her hands as at a play." There is something uniquely Parisian, too, in the spectacle of the liberation of the Bastille (with only seven prisoners inside) and in the rituals of the Terror itself, as the tumbrils roll daily to the guillotine watched by knitting ladies, who take up seats in their favored spots each morning as if at a sideshow or circus. As Dickens describes it, even the victims of the Terror cannot escape the theatrical atmosphere of the proceedings. Among the condemned, "there are some so heedful of their looks that they cast upon the multitude such glances as they have seen in theatres, and in pictures." Contrast this with Charles Darnay, who, on trial for his life earlier in the novel, disdains "the play at the Old Bailey": He "neither flinched from the situation, nor assumed any theatrical air in it." Our hero disappoints us on occasion, but here, by resisting being converted into a spectacle, he defends the most important social principle of the novel: the dignity of the private citizen in the face of the howling mob.

Your Rating:

Your Recommendations:

Barnes & Noble.com Review Rules

Our reader reviews allow you to share your comments on titles you liked,
or didn't, with others. By submitting an online review, you are representing to
Barnes & Noble.com that all information contained in your review is original
and accurate in all respects, and that the submission of such content by you
and the posting of such content by Barnes & Noble.com does not and will not
violate the rights of any third party. Please follow the rules below to help
ensure that your review can be posted.

Reviews by Our Customers Under the Age of 13

We highly value and respect everyone's opinion concerning the titles we offer.
However, we cannot allow persons under the age of 13 to have accounts at BN.com or
to post customer reviews. Please see our Terms of Use for more details.

What to exclude from your review:

Please do not write about reviews, commentary, or information posted on the product page. If you see any errors in the
information on the product page, please send us an email.

Reminder:

- By submitting a review, you grant to Barnes & Noble.com and its
sublicensees the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right and license to use the
review in accordance with the Barnes & Noble.com Terms of Use.

- Barnes & Noble.com reserves the right not to post any review -- particularly
those that do not follow the terms and conditions of these Rules. Barnes & Noble.com
also reserves the right to remove any review at any time without notice.

THE REASON I LOVE ORANGES

I first read A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens in 1969. My friend Bucky, a French-Canadian, gave me the book as a birthday present with a bouquet of daises, a blue balloon, and a wooden crate of oranges. We sat on the beach eating oranges from morning until sunset, reading A Tale of Two Cities to one another. It was one of my favorite birthdays. It is still one of my favorite books. It is probably the reason oranges are my favorite fruit.

44 out of 58 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

Anonymous

Posted August 30, 2004

Dickens at his best

This is quite possibly the best book that Dickens wrote. 'A Tale of Two Cities' has everything a reader could ask, a complex and interesting plot, realistic characters, excellent character development, and overarching social and political messages. In addition to being an exemplary work of fiction, any serious student of post-Renaissance European history should examine this text for its historiographical value. Despite the destitute situation of the French people before the French Revolution, their lives were not aided in most ways that the contemporary advocates of the revolution purported.

29 out of 34 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

Anonymous

Posted December 29, 2011

WOW!!!

I love it! I could not put the book down!!!!!!!

Maddie Toaso

17 out of 21 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

Anonymous

Posted January 14, 2011

Dull Beginning, but well worth it!

A Tale of Two Cities is a true literary classic. It superbly combines the key topics of history, politics, tragedy, love, and war all into one fantastic work. The entirety of the book is split between the two cities of London, England and Paris, France. It chronicles the course of events that took place in these two cities in the time just before and during the French Revolution. This piece of writing excellence has truly made me thankful for the time and place in which I live. The squalor and repression the majority of the populations of both England and France survived in during this period to be absolutely repulsive! I find it remarkable that Dickens was able to capture and project the true feelings of want and need expressed throughout the book onto the reader. At times I felt as if I myself was sitting in a back room of the Paris, France branch of Tellson's bank with Mr. Lorry while the citizens of Paris are actively mobbing outside. Only a select few books have ever made me feel quite this connected to their plot, something this book does superbly. Now, while I have been raving about A Tale of Two Cities, I must say that the first 200 pages were quite dull and arduous. I almost put the book down several times because of it. But, once you clear the dull beginning, this classic really heats up and becomes a very exciting, fast-paced read. One reservation I had with the book was its' enormous glorification of the horrible killing machine the Guillotine. This machine was referred to as a tall, beautiful and deadly woman and the blood of the thousands executed upon it was referred to as her wine. I found the amount of detail Dickens used to describe the repression of the common people by the nobles to be fascinating, especially given the time period in which this book was first published.
One of my favorite aspects of A Tale of Two Cities was how it so fluidly it intertwined the two halves of the story. Though the French side of the story was so very far removed from the English side of the story (that is until "Book The Third" begins) it still feels to the reader like one fluid, complete story. Even while managing to floridly intertwine to separate stories, Mr. Dickens managed to hide the true personalities of two of the main characters until the perfect moment to reveal them. This, along with the truly fantastic traits of the other characters allows this book to all but jump of the pages and into reality! The Characters of Charles Dickens seemed to me as real and human as if they were standing right in front of me!
My one complaint about this magnificent work is that the beginning seemingly drags on forever. I am a reader who likes books that get right into the plot and don't drag on too much. Because of this A Tale of Two Cities discouraged me early on, but I urge you not to get discouraged and give up on the book! If you persevere, the ending will reward you beyond measure!

16 out of 20 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

Anonymous

Posted March 5, 2009

I Also Recommend:

Notes should not ruin the story

While A Tale of Two Cities is a great book, some of Gillen D'Arcy Wood's notes are very bad. One note, in Chapter 4 of book two tells the reader that something is foreshadowing a certain character's death, thus ruining any surprise. This is unacceptable

12 out of 21 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

Don't Think You Have Read the Classics Until You Read This

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

Anonymous

Posted January 14, 2012

Wonderful

I love to read and I have read mountains of books and this remains my all time favorite. I would recommend this book to anyone.

4 out of 4 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

RasSmiling

Posted December 13, 2011

A True Classic

Charles Dickens has a unique story telling style that evokes the days of sitting by the fire listening to an artful story teller spin a yarn. He manages to weave political commentary, historical fact and a group of fictional characters into a gripping tale of love, deceit, and true international intrigue. It is easy to see why this book is considered a classic. Forget your high school bias that Classic Novels are boring. Read this book with an open mind and you will soon get lost in a far away time and form a lasting bond with the characters.

4 out of 4 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

Anonymous

Posted January 20, 2012

Wonderful book!

Some of the most beautiful writing I have ever read. I felt the beginning of the story was a litle slow but gradually the plot becomes quicker and quicker. The ending was absolutely perfect. This book makes you feel the tension, anger, sorrow, fear and bravory of the people during the French revolution. Absolute must-read.

3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

Anonymous

Posted January 5, 2012

One of the Bucket List books

I've read this book; I've taught this book; I love this book. Ok, so Lucy's fainting fits and "angel of the hearth" Victorian perfection grate on my nerves a little, but the story is so well done, that Lucy's one-dimensional character is forgivable. It really would be a shame not to read this classic.

3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

Anonymous

Posted December 27, 2011

Loved it

I couldt put it down! I loved kanes character! I reax obud it in one day until 2 in the morning. I cant wait to read the next one.

3 out of 6 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

Anonymous

Posted December 3, 2013

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens is an overall well writt

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens is an overall well written book. I don’t think that it was my favorite novel, but I do think that it was a good story and I am glad that I read it. This book is a classic that is loved by many people all across the world. There are only a few reasons why the only things that make me say that I didn’t absolutely love the book. The primary reason is that it was difficult to follow at times. I wasn’t quite sure what was going on during certain parts of the book. However, the faster you know which character is which, then the easier the book will be to read. It is very difficult if you don’t know the characters very well. That makes this book a difficult book to start reading. The beginning is very slow and the story doesn’t seem to pick up its pace until later on in the book. There were some chapters that I had to read multiple times just to understand what was going on. When you are reading this book, you need to limit your distractions, in order to focus on the story. When the story speeds up, however, it is a very good book and well worth the read. It starts to get very suspenseful, especially later on in the book. For example, in part three, I just wanted to read through the whole book to find out what would happen. I would recommend this book to any and all readers who can read high level books and enjoy history. I actually learned a lot just from reading this book. I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone who is going to lose interest in the book before the first one hundred pages, however. If you are looking for an action packed novel that is easy to read then keep looking. A Tale of Two Cities is a slower paced, sometimes confusing book that has an interesting and suspenseful story, and is well worth reading. If you are looking for challenge, and you don’t lose interest too easily, then I highly suggest picking up A Tale of Two Cities. Find yourself a quiet corner and dive in. You will be glad that you read it!

2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

Anonymous

Posted May 16, 2012

Excellent

I was suppose to read this in school, I didn't. Now that i'm 72 I am reading the classics and enjoying them. I still have no use for algebra!

2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

Anonymous

Posted December 27, 2011

?

Is it good for a ten year old.

2 out of 16 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

Anonymous

Posted December 25, 2011

:(

Im thru 15% of this book and its kind of boring and hard to follow

2 out of 11 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

BondSu

Posted November 17, 2011

Highly Recommend

A wonderful way to reread a classic. Having the dictionary available and the footnotes readily available were a added plus to Dickens' great writing skills.

2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

Anonymous

Posted June 19, 2012

Gooood

A very good book, but its also free and I think though it could be more deitailed

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

Anonymous

Posted June 13, 2012

Obsessive...

I AM SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO IN LOOOOOOOOOVE WITH THE HUNGER GAMES!!!!!!! IT IS THE BEST SERIES I HAVE EVER READ AND IF U HAVENT READ IT YOU DESERVE TO BE SMACKED SOOOOOO HARD YOUR NOSE BREAKS AND ALL UR TEETH FALL OUT!!!!! WELL LOVE YALL TTYL....

1 out of 9 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

Anonymous

Posted May 19, 2012

The footnotes

The footnotes were both good and bad. I enjoyed having the extra facts readily available, but some of the footnotes were spoilers that ruined the story. On the whole, I was very happy to have the footnotes, especially while reading on nook.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.